


The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

by orphan_account



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Alternate Universes, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, Dreams, F/M, Gen, Romance, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 15:25:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15799305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The dreams began after Eros, a few weeks after she woke up; there were four of them. Four different lives, four different stories that the thing buried somewhere in her, wanted her to know.Prompt fill!





	The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fill for Anon

There were thirteen-thousand Joe Millers in the system.

Of those thirteen-thousand, two hundred of them lived in the Belt. The long names varied, _Jonah, Josiah, Joseph, or Josephine_ and a handful of less common ones. In a system of nearly forty billion, Julie supposed she was lucky not to have more variables.

And, it wasn’t as though other matters were occupying her time, not anymore. Or rather, not here, holed up in a room in one of her parents’ houses, high in the mountains and out of the public eye.

So she sat, with a tablet propped against her knees, scanning personnel files in seemingly more multitudes that there were stars in the sky above; trying everything she knew to find the man who saved her.

Wondering and wondering and wondering; _what was he like? What did he look like outside of the mind-bending haze of the Phoebe bug? Why did he do it?_

The people who had brought her to Luna, the crew of the Rocinante; Naomi and James and Alex and Amos, had spoken of him often enough, hovering over her in biohazard suits, trying to keep her awake just a bit longer. _A name, updates on his radiation poisoning, things he’d said._

Not that he ever made an appearance. Not that she’d ever gotten to thank him.

Once she’d asked Naomi, and only gotten lazy Belter’s shrug and sympathetic smile in return.

_Had he survived Eros?_

The mere notion of him, not surviving was nauseating to begin to contemplate.

_How many people are going to die because of you?_

After Eros, it was a relief to be alive, of course, it was. But the guilty voice echoed about inside her skull haunted her more than the things she’d escaped.

Her father’s best doctors’ and scientists’ had gotten the infection from Phoebe under control. ‘Under control’ they said, not cured, but contained so it would not hurt her. The damage had been enough as the disease spread, bone spurs damaged her spine and internal organs; but three months and six operations later, she was just beginning to be able to move about.

Julie was the only victim to have ever received the treatment, which, of course, meant she was a lab rat. A lab rat with nothing to do but watch the news and stalk the man who’d given all this back to her.

But, they told her Eros was too far gone, the experiments they did with her condition could not bring them back. Nothing ever would bring back the one hundred thousand lives her own stupidity had cost.

She watched the news come in, the losses on Eros, and it’s subsequent and inexplicable dive into Venus. She felt it too; a tugging somewhere in her stomach, a spike of energy coursing through her body, and then she’d woken up upon the exact moment Eros shattered across Venus.

_You belong with me._ She’d woken with the words on her mind, and hadn’t forgotten them since. It felt like a distant memory, something important she’d been told once, maybe.

Or maybe it was like the dreams she had; evidence clear as day that the Phoebe bug was something grotesquely magnificent. That it was, or could be, a link to something else, or somewhere else.

The dreams began after Eros, a few weeks after she woke up; there were four of them. Four different lives, four different stories that the thing buried somewhere in her, wanted her to know. They were memories and pieces of lives that she never had lived, nor ever would.

Maybe she was going crazy, but all her neurological tests came back well. Maybe her certainty was evidence of insanity, but maybe, it was part of _it_ as well.

 

*

In the first dream, she lives on Ceres in a hole near the Medina. This is where she wakes up. The room is austere, nothing like the one she maintained before Eros, furnished only with the built-in kitchenette, her cot, and a table. One of the walls is papered with maps, photographs, and hand-written notes: like pieces of a puzzle that she hasn’t put together quite yet.

There are weapons in her hole, the files in her partition are innumerable; battle plans, personnel files, contacts, profiles, papers made up for six different aliases. She is an operative for the Outer Planets Alliance. Her neck and chest bare several of the signature OPA tattoos.

The scene is as real as her own life, but she is an observer, through her own eyes. The Other-Julies, as she begins to call them, drive the events. She watches as they unfurl, unable to look away.

The first other-Julie is on a mission to drive the Earth security contractors, Star Helix, off of Ceres. She has allies and colleagues but works alone, lives alone, and sees no one outside of her missions. She runs around, using fake names, false personas, several hand terminals, gathering her information by any means; flirts, threats, extortions, and betrayals. She rarely sleeps; her downtime is spent training or sorting through her new information.

Other-Julie sits on her cot, and Julie can feel how scratchy the thin wool blanket is against their bare legs. A tablet propped against her knees, scrolling through the chatter on Star Helix’s communication lines. Something catches other-Julie’s eye, a photo wired from Detective Muss’s terminal to Detective’s Miller’s terminal bearing the message. “ _Havelock found this on lvl. 26, get up here.”_

Julie notes the name, _Miller_ , but other-Julie gives her something else to consider as she opens the image. A corpse, disfigured beyond recognition by spores, flickering blue, crystals erupting through the skin and brown goo on the floor.

Julie wants to scream, of course, she cannot.

When she wakes, she’s in her hospital bed on Luna, connected to more than a dozen tubes and wires. Julie’s heart races and cold sweat grows colder on the few inches of skin not bandages where the spores used to be.

Three nurses outfitted in biohazards suits look over her, concern spelled across their faces.

 

*

Other-Julie’s comrades in the second dream hail Josephus Miller of Ceres as a hero of the Belt. The victor of the battle of Thoth station, by the time the convoy from Thoth returns, three different graffiti pieces of his face had gone up on Tycho’s walls.

The station was humming with the news and the celebrations of Dr. Dresden’s death, the monster of Eros, Phoebe, and the Canterbury, gone at last.

But, instead of reveling in his new, found glory with her peers, Other-Julie finds him in the back corner of a tiny bar, entirely by accident. Other-Julie was supposed to meet someone, an informant of Johnson’s, but the man had never shown.

She spots him on a semi-discrete patrol of the bar looking for her contact. So, instead of continuing her patrol, she slides into the booth next to him and introduces herself.

She was all but shouting over the heavy bass of the music as she did, barely able to make out his face under the flashing lights. Probably why he’d selected such a location to mope.

Nevertheless, she extends a hand, congratulates him on his service to the Belt, and they get to talking, or rather shouting over the din, sharing the bottle Miller had purchased from the bar.

As it happened, he was here agonizing over his decision to kill Dresden. And Other-Julie succeeds in coxing him to review a few things; formerly a cop on Ceres, he’d joined the OPA’s forces five years prior. He spends most of his time on security contracts for Dawes or Johnson, most recently assigned, and fired from the _Rocinante._

He hasn’t the faintest idea who she was, which suites her just fine,

Hours and a few too many drinks later, they’re in some cheap hotel on one of Tycho’s shittier levels.

Other-Julie lies awake, her head resting between his shoulder and neck, her hand resting against his chest. His long, slow breathing plays gently with her hair. Julie can feel moisture cooling and drying against her bare skin.

She’s just beginning to drift off, the sensation mesmerizing and calming, when a flicker of light in the half dark catches her eye. Unthinking, Other-Julie reaches out, brushing her fingers towards it. Her fingers brush the underside of Miller’s wrist and come away wet with the shimmering blue stuff.

_The stuff, the protomolecule, killer of thousands on Eros and Phoebe._

Julie jerks awake, safe in her room on Earth; her heart hammering away in her chest. And she feels as though she is cracking, splitting open from fear and grief.

 

*

The third Other-Julie is on Ganymede Station when Julie joins with her.

Other-Julie is propped up in a hospital bed, a blood oxygen monitor on her index finger and an IV tugging at her arm. To her right she can make out three monitors looking at her vitals and running medical scans.

Other-Julie remembered before, she’d been at some session trying to broker a deal on uses for the protomolecule between Mars, Earth and the Belt. And then… she was paralyzingly, terrifyingly unaware as to what had happened after she fainted during the meeting.

Before Julie has a moment to thoroughly contemplate what was happening, Other-Julie lurches forward, grabs the pan sitting on her bedside table and vomits into it.

“You’re awake— oh Jesus!” Joe Miller appears from somewhere off her left side, instantly reaching for her, pulling the loose hair out of Other-Julie’s face. His free hand rests in the middle of her back, tracing steady, calming circles there.

Julie tries to focus on that, instead of the sensations in the body she’s become a strange guest in. She tries to impress into her mind, what he looks like, what he sounds like; anyway, or reason to find him when she woke.

Other-Julie’s retching had subsides, he sets the bedpan across the room, returning with a glass of water.

He asks her how she’s feeling, helping her to hold the glass steady with her shaking hands, Other-Julie watches what he does, so Julie must too. She notes the twin silver bands on their left hands, how familiar they are with each other.

Other-Julie leans back against his chest, grumbling something about how sick she felt. He tells her he’s sorry and he loves her.

The dream feels a home, absent of the abject fear she felt at the others. It felt like a fond memory, the rippling and rebounding of the lives she sees building together to make this the best.

Other-Julie kisses the hand he has intertwined with hers and turns halfway to look him in the eye. She tells him that it probably wasn’t his fault and that she could only hope against hope that she hadn’t caught that the protomolecule bug as well.

_I’m sure it doesn’t want anything to do with us, all the studies say it’s interested in bacteria… stuff like that._

Other-Julie doesn’t have the heart to tell him he’s wrong.

*

The fourth time she wakes up somewhere else, something is off. She’s not an Other-Julie; she’s not herself, _she’s everything._

And everything is blue,. Flickering, bright blue-colored lights a float in the air, surrounding her, moving in unison to create patterns and shapes in the air.

She’s lying on the ground, she knows as much, and when this strange Other-Julie looks around, Julie sees what’s around her. A cave, made of blue and black filaments, linking together and flickering with the same light as the specks in the air.

The filaments form a vaulted dome over the place where she lies, and stretch unevenly across the floor, like moss growing over a rock. Where she lies, is a depression in the grotto’s floor, sized like it was made for her to rest there.

Julie glances down at herself, and she’s made of blue light. She can see but not feel where her form begins and the rest of the grotto begins. The limbs she can’t feel are tangled with more light; another form, another person.

Other-Julie knew exactly who it was, though the realization came to her slowly as though she too were just waking from a long rest. _Joe Miller, former Star Helix Security, the one who came for her, he brought her to Venus. The one who saved everyone._

Other-Julie had held his hand while the thing they’d become overcame him. Surrounded as they were by the thing keeping them here when their bodies were gone, his death had been quicker than Other-Julie’s, he’d been _afraid, afraid, afraid._

Julie wishes he would look up, his head rested just above where their heart might be if they were still human.

Other-Julie makes a faint noise that echoes through the grotto, as though every inch of filament were speaking out in agreement with her.

Like a response to it, Miller shifts. He lifts his head off her and to the side. Other-Julie feels his movements, but as though they were her own. She would’ve missed the movement if she hadn’t been watching.

And suddenly, Julie isn’t Other-Julie, she is both of them, or maybe all of them. Miller’s thoughts and Other-Julie’s mingle and intertwine until the only thing left is profound understanding, even in their minds, there is no border between their existence.

_We’re not dead._ Miller says, without speaking, his wonder at the fact resonating around the room, bouncing back and forth, spreading to every part of them.

_This will be interesting._ Other-Julie agrees.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This was my *first* attempt at writing anything here so thanks for bearing with me! I kind of have an idea for a story here so this might just be an intro!  
> ~sinara-smith


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